This photograph from 1893 shows the main street in Rehovot. The village is not crowded, and the scattered houses are mostly two-floors high. Between the houses, to the right, is an unpaved, dirt road running up the hill titled in German, in the bottom right, as “Rechowot, Jacobstrasse,” meaning Jacob Street. There is a group of people in the foreground, perhaps taking a break from agricultural work. Many saplings have been planted near the foreground and fences placed to mark specific areas of the land.
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Rehovot - Rehovot, which lies twenty kilometres south of Tel Aviv, was founded in 1890 by immigrants from Poland. The land for the new moshava was purchased for the settlers by Yehoshua Hankin, a Zionist activist who was responsible for most of the major land purchases of the Zionist Organization in Ottoman and Mandatory Israel. The name Rehovot (meaning wide expanses) was proposed by Israel Belkind, a pioneer of the First Aliyah, founder of the Bilu pioneer organisation who borrowed it from a biblical town of the same name in the Negev desert. The first settlers planted vineyards, almond orchards, and citrus groves. The houses were built along two main streets: Jacob Street, in memory of head of the settlers’ foundation, Ya’akov Broyda, and Binyamin Street, named after Baron de Rothchild (whose Hebrew name was Benjamin). These early settlers suffered from the same hardships as many other moshavot at that time: they lacked knowledge and experience in farming, had limited resources, and were in constant conflict with the surrounding Arab villages. In 1907, a group of Yemenites joined the moshava after being forced to leave Kvutzat Kinneret (Kinneret Farm).
Like many other moshavot in the centre of Israel, Rehovot evolved throughout the twentieth century from a small agricultural village to a modern and diverse city. Today, Rehovot is home to about 130,000 people and is Israel’s thirteenth largest city. It is also home to the Weizmann Institute of Science and the agricultural wing of the Hebrew University.
